For businesses large and small, relying on a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite such as Microsoft Office 365 is becoming the norm. Enhancing productivity in your organisation is vital to get ahead in 2017 - and using Office 365 can help, if it's used right...

Yahoo wordplay baffles users

Portal's email filtering system coins verbal clangers

Internet portal Yahoo has inadvertently changed the language on hundreds of documents on the web through the creation of bizarre new words.

The problem, as highlighted this week by satirical newsletter Need To Know, stems from the company's email filtering system.

First introduced in March last year, Yahoo's email filter is designed to prevent malicious scripts being inserted into HTML emails.

But it does this by replacing a potentially dangerous word with something not used in scripting languages, often with bizarre consequences.

For example, the word 'eval' in a HTML mail is converted to 'review', 'mocha' is changed into 'espresso' and 'expression' is replaced with 'statement'.

Substitutions are carried out even if the blacklisted word appears within another word, as in 'medieval' for example.

And these email oddities seem to be getting everywhere. A quick scan of Google reveals more than 640 instances of pages that now contain the word 'medireview' instead of 'medieval'.

Some 250 instances of 'reviewuation' in place of 'evaluation' have been reported, and even the odd case of someone with a 'blank statement on his face'.

The appearance of these inadvertent neologisms has sparked confusion among many internet users, particularly those interested in medieval research - sorry, medireview research - who now think they've missed out on something important.